On the evening of January 7, our neighbor banged on our door and told me she’d seen this before. She begged me to pack and get out of the house. She said it again, louder, over the sound of the strong winds. I must have looked confused.
“The fire!” she said. “It’s heading right for us!”
She was panting. She had been running up and down our street, alerting our neighbors. It took me a moment to understand the dire nature of the situation. Looking back now, I realize she saved our lives.
I looked up and saw an orange glow behind the houses in the distance. The Santa Ana winds were fierce. We’d experienced them before, but this time, something felt different. The 100 mph winds made our front door shake. I could barely pull it shut. The house rumbled. Our children were at my parents’ house, where a fire had erupted in the canyon across the street. I called my husband, who was already on his way there, to pick them up.
“Our neighbors are evacuating. Do we really need to leave?”
“Pack,” he said.
On their way back home, my husband and children watched the flames consume the hills. I packed an outfit for each of us, my computer and zip drive, the kids’ favorite stuffed animals. When they arrived, we encouraged the kids to choose one cherished toy from their bedrooms. We kept things light. My daughter asked us if our house could actually burn down. We said of course not. The city was evacuating us for safety measures, but the fire was too far away. This was just protocol. When the winds kicked up, when there was fire on the hills, you packed to obey the evacuation order. You spent a night away and then returned. We’d done this before, when we first moved into the house five years earlier.
We grabbed important paperwork, my wedding ring. I fed the sourdough starter I had activated that morning. I had spent hours making sourdough discard crackers and my first ever sourdough loaf. I packed the loaf too. It would be the only thing our sweet dog Milli would be willing to eat for the next few days. We rushed south to my cousin’s house in Pasadena, but when the smoke got worse, the sound of the sirens overwhelming, we fled to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
I couldn’t sleep. I pictured my parents’ house, my childhood home, being engulfed in flames. As we saw news coverage of the fire passing by their home and heading south to the synagogue and the nursing home down the street, nurses and doctors rolling patients out in gurneys and wheelchairs into the streets where the smoke and wind created fire tornadoes, I was sure the house was burning. I prayed for their home all night. I fell asleep and then woke up and prayed again.
In the morning, a friend of ours called to tell us our parents’ home was still standing. My dad’s face relaxed. My mom filled the empty breakfast plate she’d been staring at. We hugged one another. We were going to be okay. We were safe. We just needed to stay away from the smoke for a few days.
I smiled, but inside I was bewildered. From our hotel, we could see the black cloud that grew over the San Bernardino mountains. The sky was brown, the light coming through like it was forever dusk.
“Tamar. Our house is gone.”
This is the text from a friend who lived at the northeast end of our Altadena neighborhood.
I responded with shock and sympathy. I asked her if I could do anything to help.
And then.
“Your area is burning. The entire neighborhood is gone.”
I begged her to please go back and check on our house, but she couldn’t get through. She said it was so bad, they could barely breathe. They had to get out of there. My Ring app pushed notifications all morning. There were addresses of homes burned down appearing on my phone screen, one after the other. People asking if their homes were still standing. The street above us was gone. The one below us. Then the street west of us. I sent a message out around 10:00 a.m. asking someone to please tell me if our street was gone. I was begging.
My husband was back in Pasadena trying to get through, but everything was burning. There was no way to get there safely. So, he went to help my uncle whose garage was burning—the garage that was full of his tools for his contracting business.
At 11:48 a.m., our neighbor texted us.
“I’m so sorry.”
And then the picture came through. Our house, our home, a pile of rubble, no longer existent. Our fireplace was the only thing that remained.
I put my phone down and closed my eyes. I pictured our home on a summer day. The magnolia tree swaying in the warm California breeze. The orange door, bright. The windows that look out to the deck and trees budding with fresh green leaves. My son’s little feet pounding the hardwood floors. My daughter’s drawings taped to her bedroom door. The shadow boxes in each of the kids’ rooms with their hospital onesies and birth announcements. My books with all my notes, signed by author friends. The deck where we spent many of our Sunday afternoons, drinking coffee and watching the kids swing on the trees down below. Where we found our footing again. Where we had some of the best days of our life, close to family, in my hometown. The place where, after years of moving around, we deemed our forever home, ready to finally set roots down and stay.
And then guilt rushed in. How could I have let this happen? How could I have abandoned our home and not been there when its walls, our things, our most intimate moments, exploded and burned to the ground? I wasn’t there to stop it. To hold our home’s hand while it perished. It felt like a death. A living, breathing part of our lives. A soul that held all our sorrow. Witnessed all our joy. Kept all our secrets.
I looked at the photo again and immediately laid down on the hotel bed, trying to ground myself, glad that my son was distracted by his video games. How could I explain to my children that we’d lost everything? My breathing shortened, my body was unable to catch up to the reality of our loss. My aunt rushed over to me, held my hand, called out my name. I looked at her, desperate. It wasn’t shock in her eyes. It was knowing.
She’d seen this before.
My husband, our parents, our aunts and uncles—they are immigrants displaced by war. After our ancestors were exiled during the Armenian Genocide, many settled in Beirut, Lebanon. Later, war and civil unrest forced them to flee to the United States. They knew what it was like to be pushed out of their homes. To hide in dark stairwells with their neighbors. They came to America because they believed they were not only saving themselves, but their future children and their children’s children. All my life I listened to their stories of the horrors of war, of hunger, of not knowing where they would sleep that night. I saw the effects of violence in their lives. The secrets they kept. The mistakes they made. They way they recovered because survival was the goal. It was the only option. Pushing through the pain was their only way forward, for the sake of all of us.
I took their stories, what I saw in their lives resulting from their trauma, and wrote a novel, Home is Only a Word, about a woman who is displaced because of the civil war in Lebanon in 1990 and spends her life in America longing for home. She grieves the loss of her former life. Her memories about her childhood in Lebanon give her reprieve from her mistakes. The trauma of her past leads her to make bad decisions. I started writing this book soon after we moved into our new home in Altadena and continued working on my manuscript for the five years we lived there. I began pitching it to agents. I wrote a story about exile and longing for home in the very home that burned down and displaced us, too.
***
A week later, the fires still burning on the hills, we gathered with family to grieve. My first cousin and her family also lost their home. We looked at each other across the table and I knew she was thinking the same thing—how could anyone who hadn’t been through what we’d just experienced really understand what it felt like to lose everything? To watch our children lose it all. During dinner, we tried to keep things light for the kids. We said yes to buttered noodles and ice cream. We let them jump from one booth to another. But by the end of the meal, we were all crying. My aunts and uncles, my parents, had not only tears in their eyes, but terror. My father is the most even-keeled person I know, but there was fear in his eyes.
And it hit me—they knew how this felt, and they believed they had failed us. They thought they had saved us by coming to America, but now, they couldn’t change what we had lost. They could no longer protect us from the fear, the violation. No matter how much we tried to settle into new places and find our footing, we would never be able to go home again. Their dream of saving us from the trauma they experienced had dissipated with our homes’ decimation.
My husband witnessed war. He hid from bullets and scrambled for food. Took turns with his family sleeping on the floor of a tiny room in a basement because it was the only safe space. But he said he always had hope. Because they knew when the shelling died down, they could go back home. When he saw the remnants of our house, the wreckage of burnt houses for miles, he said it was worse than the war. The hope was gone. There was nothing to come back to. There was nowhere to hide.
It can take less than five minutes for a house to be engulfed in flames. Less than fifteen minutes for structural collapse. About an hour for it to fully burn down. It took me two weeks to gather the courage to go back home. As we drove up to the house, I was disoriented, because everything looked different. Our whole town was gone. Our grocery store. Our bank. Our beloved local coffee shop and pizza parlor. I didn’t know where I was until I saw the magnolia tree, rigid and charred. I watched my husband walk on the ashes. He pointed at where our bedroom was and where my desk and books used to be. I caressed the wall that had collapsed in the hallway near the entrance and closed my eyes again, picturing walking in with our happy kids wearing their backpacks after school. Our poor house, in shambles.
Our lives in a million pieces.
I wrote my book next to our washing machine, one word at a time, nestled by the window that looked out at our magnolia tree. I wrote it surrounded by my books and notecards, with the smell of bread baking, and the sound of my kids playing. I wrote it on our deck, the dog lying next to me in the sun. I wrote it next to the fireplace late at night while my husband got things ready for the next day, grinding coffee beans and making the kids’ lunches. I walked alongside my protagonist who went back and forth from her current life where things were supposed to be better, where she strived to follow in her parents’ footsteps to keep their legacy alive, to her past in Lebanon, where neighbors came over for coffee unannounced, where she had just one Sunday dress for church, where she felt the happiest even in the midst of war. I wrote it inside the home that would, in a few years, become a pile of ashes.
People try to comfort me by reminding me that we still have our memories. But how can I explain what it feels like to have everything snatched away from you overnight?
At least once a day, my son comes over to me, wherever we are, and whispers in my ear: Our house burned down. The day after we moved into our rental, he cried before bed, telling us he left his memories on the floor of the old house, and they’re all gone. We tried to encourage him to make new ones, but he said he doesn’t want new ones. He wants his old memories. Our daughter keeps drawing pictures of the old house and then pictures of what she wants the new house to look like. One night, while I tucked her into bed, praising her drawings, her smile faded, and she told me that no matter what we did or said, the rental would never feel like home, and the new house we planned on building would never be home either.
Yes, perhaps the memories we carry are a balm, but the pain is heavy. Time moves much faster than our pain. Time moves me farther and farther away from our last moments at home. This is what hurts the most. I wonder if I will ever get that feeling back, of being fully at rest where our daily story unfolds—our triumphs and our defeats.
Home is a word I cherish, because now I understand. A word disappearing from our mouths, nestled deep, buried. Home is a word that holds the pulse and breath of our joy, now in charred remains.
My family has seen this loss and now I can say I have too. The death of our past. The crumbling of our future selves. In the rental house, I sit at my new desk next to our bed where I lay awake at night, wondering how we got here—how quickly our lives transformed. I cook meals in a kitchen that is not ours. I tidy up a space that feels foreign. We try to carry on our normal routines in a new life that feels forced upon us. I promise the kids we will never call it home. I send out queries with renewed passion. One word at a time, I try to piece things together on the page, the only place I can lay myself open. A story that lives deep inside of me. One I won’t stop telling. One I hope can one day heal us.
***
Artwork by Nicholas Crespo
